In a bid to explore the inventive mindset of Singapore students, a toy inventioncompetition was organized to attract budding inventors from amongst the studentpopulation. Participants were required to build a prototype based on physics principles sothat it could reveal certain aspects of their inventive capabilities. Three evaluationinstruments were specially designed to provide data for analyses. The key findings of thisexploratory study are that a) students are motivated by intrinsic rewards when enteringinvention competitions, b) the educational environment is becoming more conducive forinventors, c) female students are just as interested in invention competitions as malestudents, d) students are not interested in becoming full-time inventors but are willing totake it up as a hobby, e) students from the express stream are more predisposed ,towardsinventing than those from the normal stream. In terms of level of creativity of the entries, itappears that there is still some way to go even though some of the entries are of a highstandard.

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This paper was published in the Proceedings of ERAS Conference held in Singapore from 24-26 November 2004